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“In my experience that’s hardly evidence of delusion,” he said. “Goliath is out to get lots of people. Being wary of multinationals shouldn’t be paranoia, and more a case of standard operating procedure.”
Goliath wasn’t universally loved, but since it employed almost a fifth of England’s workforce, no one was keen to rock the boat. Few ever dared to speak out against the behemoth.
“I see,” Chumley said, pen poised above the “signature” part of the certificate. “And what form does this harm take? Assassination?”
“I’m too valuable to assassinate,” I told him. “They’re more interested in attempting to access information by impersonation. There are people who might talk only to me about information that Goliath is after.”
“They’d have to be good impersonators to fool people who know you well.”
I thought for a moment. I wanted to aim for what Analogy had been given: a NUT-4. Anything saner and I was probably too normal; anything more insane and I’d be disqualified. I wondered what Phoebe Smalls had been given. She was utterly sane—but smart, too, so I’d have to assume that she knew the system as well as I did. She’d probably go for the same. It
would be a delicate task not merely to feign madness but just the right level of madness. I leaned forward.
“It’s not the sort of impersonators you imagine. The Goliath Corporation has made considerable advances in the manufacture of Homo syntheticus,” I told him, “and for a few years now they’ve been manufacturing Thursdays who try to pass themselves off as me—six times that we know of.”
“Did you take these synthetics to the police?”
“The police are run by Goliath. I have a feeling we’d be wasting our time.”
“I see. And where are those Synthetics now?”
I stared at him thoughtfully. Although the Homo syntheticus were wholly artificial, they appeared sentient. If they were shown to be legally equivalent to neanderthals, we could be convicted of murder. If they were deemed illegally spliced chimeras, we were in no trouble at all—and could even claim a bounty by presenting an eyelid as proof. I decided to play it safe.
“I have no idea of their precise whereabouts.”
He stared at me for a moment, attempting to gauge if this idea could be real or was only a complex delusion.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m going to make you a NUT-2: ‘generally sane.’ Seven Thursdays? Interesting.”
It was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t enough.
“There weren’t seven,” I said quickly. “There were ten.”
“Ten?”
I counted them out on my fingers. “Six synthetics, two fictional Thursdays, me and my gran, who wasn’tactually my gran— just a version of me that I thought was my gran, hiding in our present rather than hers. She had to spend the last twenty years of her life in gingham and read the ten most boring classics.”
“I’m sure there was a good reason.”
“Because she—I—changed the ending of Jane Eyre. It was an Illegal Narrative Flexation; they would have liked to let me off, but the law is the law. Oh, perhaps I should have added that for much of my career I’ve worked for Jurisfiction. It’s a sort of policing agency in the BookWorld, the realm that exists beyond the other side of the printed page.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Many times. I can read my way across, or at least I could before the accident. My mentor was Miss Havisham, who was terrific so long as you didn’t mention the wedding, and Emperor Zhark, who is a barrel of laughs when he’s not subjugating entire star systems in his tyrannical and inadequately explained quest for galactic domination.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Remember how two weeks went missing out of Samuel Pepys’s diary a few years back? That was me having an off day.”
I continued in this vein for a while, outlining various adventures I’d had in the BookWorld. I talked about the ongoing metaphor shortage, Speedy Muffler, the witheringly tiresome internal politics at the Council of Genres, about imaginotransference engines, UltraWord, Commander Bradshaw’s gorilla wife, Melanie, and the first time I was attacked by grammasites. I ended with an account of the reason for my current physical state during an assassination attempt in a quiet corner of the Thriller genre and how Red Herring had been responsible.
“Was Red Herring a red herring?” asked Chumley in some confusion.
“No,” I replied reflectively, “but his name was. By calling Red Herring Red Herring, it made people think that he couldn’t be a red herring as it was too obvious, so his name—Red Herring— then became the red herring when we found out he wasn’t a red herring. Simple, yes?”
“No.”
“I agree it’s complicated,” I said with a shrug. “Working in fiction does gives one a somewhat tenuous hold on reality, but it’s not the hold that’s tenuous—it’s the reality: Which reality? Whose reality? Does it matter anyway? And will there be cake?” “And was there?”
